SmarterQueue Review – The Best Social Media Tool for Bloggers

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Below is a non-sponsored SmarterQueue review, a tour around the dashboard, and some quick facts to help YOU decide if this is the social media management /automation tool for YOUR blog or business. I’m a loyal paying customer now 🙂

Raise your hand if you have everDREADED filling up your social media sharing queue? It takes a TON of work.

We all know blog marketing is important…but automating, managing, and maintaining your channels can be tiring, boring, and even frustrating.

What is SmarterQueue? (SQ)

SQ is a social media management and automation tool. Most bloggers use these tools to load “share queues” with their blog content (and other people’s content), to pre-schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

In addition to scheduling content to be shared, most tools like SQ come with built-in analytics so you can judge which pieces of content perform, at what times, to which platforms, etc.

SQ has incredible analytics AND evergreen content recycling, making it one of the most powerful social media tools I’ve seen.

Why I switched from Buffer to SmarterQueue

Full disclosure: Throughout my blogging career, I’ve used Hootsuite, Buffer, AND Hootsuite. I’ve been around the block social media wise.

For the past 2 years, I’ve been paying $110/year for Buffer Pro, which I was more or less satisfied with.

The UI is ok (not fantastic)

The Buffer Chrome extension is great.

The features were pretty standard.

Overall, Buffer worked out well, but there was a huge issue: it still took A TON of my time every week to add content to my queues and keep things updated.

2 months ago I got sick of it, and started shopping around again.

After grumbling at the $50/month price tag of MeetEdgar for about an hour, I eventually some random blogger mentioning they switched to SmarterQueue.

Right off the bat, I noticed they had the core feature I was looking for in a social media automation tool: content re-queueing (or recycling, or evergreen, or whatever you’d want to call it):

From their features page…

Um yes please.

And what’s the next page I generally look at? Duh. The SmarterQueuePricing page:

40% the price of MeetEdgar w/ better analytics? yes please.

Last but not least, the free trial sold me. I decided to pause my Buffer queue and try out SQ for a few weeks to try it out.

Here’s a brief SmarterQueue review, walkthrough and tutorial

1 – First, you add your social profiles

Easy. Connect the social media profiles you want to share to. They currently support…

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram (!)

LinkedIn

And coming soon? Pinterest and Google+.

I am really excited to see what their Pinterest scheduling looks like. It’s potentially game-changing, as it could replace Tailwind and Boardbooster (saving me even more cash per month probably)

2 – You set your categories

I have separate categories for my own content, other people’s content, random comments, and even client posts. You could totally choose categories based on…

different blogs you run

categories of your blog posts

normal content vs. sponsored content

etc

The category page

3 – You set your sharing schedule

This is where SQ REALLY shines.

Here’s the Buffer scheduler:

:/

You have do set this for every single social profile. It’s annoying.

Here’s the SmarterQueue schedule:

!

You can either drag-n-drop different categories/social profiles straight to the calendar, click within the calendar, OR have SmarterQueue analyze your social profiles and create a custom schedule automatically.

Um wait what?

Yup. When you first sign up and connect your social profiles, SmarterQueue can dig back through your old content on Twitter, Facebook, etc, and create a schedule for you!

It’s magic.

4 – You add content!

There are a few different ways to add content to your queue:

From any page on the internet via the “bookmark link” (see below)

From the menubar in your dashboard

Add in bulk via an RSS feed OR a .csv file….from within the dashboard! Super sweet

While SQ doesn’t currently have a Chrome extension, they DO have a link you can bookmark, and simply click to share from any website.

the “bookmark link”sooo awesome

In addition, the ability to add and save RSS feeds for adding content is absolutely amazing.

Check out the add-content dashboard within SQ itself.

Really cool features.

5 – You check analytics! (In 3 really cool ways)

For the price, SmarterQueue’s analytics are FAR superior to that of both Buffer and MeetEdgar.

1- You can analyze any social media account on the web. Not just yours. This provides an incredible amount of insights.

What types of tweets get more retweets, those with pictures or those without? Those with links or those without? Which hashtags get me the most likes and engagement?

All of THOSE question. It’s insanely useful.

Here’s an example from my own Twitter account. What other blogger mentions get me the most retweets?

2 – You can analyze every single post/share/tweet

Most social media tools have this, but SmarterQueue’s is by far the most user-friendly and helpful I’ve seen. You can either:

Scroll through your past posts in queue (filtered by clicks, retweets, or time), or

View each evergreen post and compare cycles!

Below is a Facebook post I’m recycling:

Gimme a break. Only 200 followers right now.

3 – Last, you can run reports

I.e. you want to see some fancy graphs and statistics over a set period of time. I.e. My Instagram page over the past 3 months.

No screenshots needed, but it is pretty handy.

SmarterQueue vs MeetEdgar

The draw to both of these platforms is the ability to RECYCLE content automatically, so you don’t have to log-in to the platform every day to schedule your content.

It’s an amazing feature, and one people are generally willing to pay more for. But how much more??

MeetEdgar is a flat $50 a month, and provides the following advanced features:

Content recycling

Categories

Import via RSS

Browser Extension

Direct video uploads

Auto-expiring content

Sweet! BUT SmarterQueue has all of these too starting at $16 a month, PLUS some features MeetEdgar doesn’t have, such as…

Question for you, are you going to give SmarterQueue a try? Comment below!

Reader Interactions

Comments

I am really going to look into it as I too have struggled with Buffer a little bit but then again I only have the free plan. It seems like this tool would help me bridge some scheduling issues I currently run into that just are very time-consuming. However, what I can’t tell from your post is there a mobile app that can be used to create content to share later or does it all have to be done via the Web App.

There IS a mobile app. I have it downloaded, but haven’t actually opened it yet to check it out lol

Edit: Ok apparently the mobile app is mainly just to release your Instagram queue at the moment, thought opening SmarterQueue on your phone’s browser does work (i.e. is mobile friendly, can edit the queue, etc).

Wow – so I actually read this review with no intent of trying out SmarterQueue… but now I’m thinking about trying it. I’ve used Hootsuite before, but stopped using it after they reduced social media scheduling from unlimited to 30 (I like to schedule in batches).